Occasionally you read a book and love it and then you reread it and it is deeper, more architecturally sophisticated, not just an absorbing read, and you love it more and hope it will be on curricula for decades. Looking for Her by Carolyn Marie Souaid is such a book, a novel from a Quebec Press with an interest in political writing.
The engine of the story turns in the head of the main character, Cate, who has drifted to this point in her life, absorbing her fate or martyrdom with gritted teeth, until she encounters by random chance a medic and a patient in emergency. They, by living, demonstrate other options in how to live. Although Cate doesn’t realize it right away, her life has just opened.
In a flashback in section 3 the Inuk youth Nuna asks Cate, what is interstitial? That hinge brings into focus the set of doors.
Cate’s life is in some senses falling apart, between her parents marriage, her mother’s impending death, her own marriage, her unexamined values, and her project of a teen she takes in.
The unconscious hasn’t decided, hasn’t moved, but the stillness of domestic routine, the husband’s intolerance of a house that is less than a showroom of order, seems ready for a curtain to be lifted. The stage set is changing but we are on the internal journey and can imagine what happens off-stage after the novel concludes. The book doesn’t over direct. It dispassionately relates, Cate’s neutral remarks on her husband is left to unpack for significance with the reader. Cate will flow with anything.
Although a very different book in narration style and energy there’s some overlap with we could be rats by Emily Austin. It has characters of a similar dynamic, in that case sisters, while in Looking for Her it is the husband Liam who would make nice, compensate, avoid conflict, while the wife Cate is resistance, turmoil, needing the world to change.
Born of the same white middle class nurturing but one seeks placid, stays silent, stifles dissent, denies problems blithely, studying polite and correct, insists all is fine, elbows the ribs of those who would make waves. It feels calm as a tinderbox.
The reader gets reveals through Nuna as she realizes how south-centric, how colonially embedded Cate’s assumptions are for what Nuna needs to know to study, to get ahead, to be her definition of successful. We see Nuna drawn in by her omissions as well. Nothing is made cloying or sentimental. All characters move clear-eyed or closed-eyed. It shows that coming of age can happen at any age, but the key thing is choosing to mature.
There’s an upstairs downstairs quality of a middle class woman “adopting” an Indigenous young woman to mentor and give better chances to. What is this charitable impulse? What is the power dynamic? It depends on whose perspective. The story does not villainize but is aware of structural racism and of observation biases. It opens the frame to admit more than white middle class het perspective, and not only though brown, queer and Inuit characters. It is quietly contemplative yet has a mystery driving the suspense of where Nuna went and if she is okay.
The book enacts how there can be mutually exclusive perspectives with no one only wrong. Life gets muddier than discrete boxes suggest. What are you owed? Who do you owe? Who calls you family? Life is more complex than that and the author shows its ably and sensitively. I hope Looking for Her gets reprinted for decades.
Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of nine poetry collections and the acclaimed novel, Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik, set in Nunavik (Northern Canada), where she lived and worked for three years in the 1980s. She has performed at literary events in Canada and abroad, her work garnering a top prize at the 2012 Berlin Zebra Poetry Film Festival. Her literary papers (1967-2022) are housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University’s McLennan Library.
Publisher: Baraka Books (October 1, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 260 pages
ISBN: 9781771863483
Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
- Pearl Piriehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/pearl-pirie/
