Death In Sunset Grove

Four Funerals And A Wedding

India is just about beginning to realise problem of elder care— people are living longer, in urban areas homes are getting smaller; with everyone out at work, there is nobody at home to look after old people in the family, unless they are rich enough to afford help. Our culture still looks down upon homes for senior citizens, though in the West, it is an accepted form of ‘vanaprastham.’

It is believed that in wealthy nations, elders are well looked after in old age homes, so it is shocking to read Finnish journalist-turned-author Minna Lindgren’s Death In Sunset Grove (in an English translation), which busts that myth. It is the first of a trilogy, which for the English market has been labelled The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency Series.  This might actually do the book a disservice, because it immediately brings to mind Alexander McCall Smith’s popular The Ladies No 1 Detective Agency which is very different; also comparing it to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books is not quite accurate. The ladies here are not really detectives, they just want to correct a few wrongs, by finding out what is really going on in the place where they have come to spend the last years of their lives.

Lindgren reportedly wrote the book after doing a magazine article about retirement homes in Finland (for which she won an award). Thebook is set in such an establishment, called Sunset Grove. The three protagonists of the book--Siiri, Irma, and Anna-Liisa, are in the nineties; they have lost their husbands, some children and friends, simply by outliving them. Lindgren does not look at old age with rose-tinted glasses—behind the camaraderie and humour, is fear of loneliness, illness, and loss of dignity. There is also the carefree attitude that comes with such advanced age—what it the worst that can happen?  Death?

The Lavender Ladies—so called because in the opening scene of the novel, they are all dressed in varying shades of purple-- are all aflutter about the sudden death of the young cook at the Grove. As they cope with the mostly clueless director of the home and the vicious head nurse, they realise there is much else to worry about.  Anyone who asks too many questions is seen as a trouble-maker, quickly sedated and bundled off to a closed section for dementia patients, where mistreatment and over-medication drives them to a vegetative state, and speeds up the end.

The lives of the women, with their dietary and fashion quirks, their days spent reading, gossiping, playing cards or wandering about, are punctuated with funerals of inmates, which, for them are special occasions. Siiri is the kind who takes long tram rides and observes Helsinki’s architectural marvels.  When her best friend Irma is locked up in the out-of-bounds dementia ward, Siiri, with some unexpected help from Anna-Liisa rescues her. In their adventures they are aided by a cab driver Mika, who opens their eyes to the criminal goings on in the home, and is not averse to resorting to crime himself, if it would help his lady friends in Sunset Grove.

The women observe that the quality of the staff deteriorates over time, with untrained young immigrants, who can’t speak the language, being dumped with duties of looking after old people, because nobody wants to do it.

Their own children are too busy to care, but it seems particularly heartless when the daughter of one of them says she can’t make the time to visit, because she has to look after her horses. When it looks like Irma would return from the hospital, her family, whom she calls “her darlings” turn up to divide up her belongings.

The book is funny and full of hope, laughter and courage, but also depressing—if old age means indifference of the family and the casual cruelty of strangers. Still, the wonderful characters in Lindgren’s book, find ways to be happy, and reasons to go on living.

Death In Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

Translated Lola Rogers
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Pages: 384

The Sympathizer

Man In The Middle

Whatever little the world knows about the Vietnam War, it is from the point of view of the Americans. They first interfered in another country’s affairs, and unleashed horrific violence, including chemical warfare (the infamous napalm) on the Vietnamese people; then, when they got whipped, American movies portrayed the Vietnamese as savages.

Which is why Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer is such an important and powerful piece of work, for which he deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.

The unnamed protagonist of the novel is a spy, a communist mole, who by his proximity to the General, the chief of South Vietnam’s the secret police, is privy to many secrets. Nguyen is very critical of his country’s elite, who paid their way out of the country when the communists won the war. The very complex and very gripping story is in the form of a confession to another authority figure, a Commandant.

The narrator writes of the tragedy of his country with clarity—in a particularly satirical section, he is hired by a pompous Hollywood filmmaker as a consultant on  film he is making on the Vietnam War (obviously a lampooning of Apocalypse Now!), in which Asians do not even have speaking parts.

The man, called Captain by his boss, is quite literally living a double life—he is a half-breed illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother and a French Catholic priest;; he was educated in the US, where is suffered the usual racosm but learnt to speak English without an accent. Still, he returned to his country to live perilously. As he writes in the book’s opening chapter, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.”

Captain has two close friends, or blood brothers, one of whom, Bon is a CIA assassin and the other, Man, is his handler. This sets the plot for guilt, betrayal and much emotional turbulence. Captain participates in the murder of a man he refers to as the crapulent major, and is so riven by guilt that he keeps giving money to the man’s wife.

He remains a spy even in America, from where he keeps sending coded messages to Man in invisible ink. The General and his cohorts, unhappy with their squalid lives in the US, plan a counter­revolutionary invasion, and the narrator lands bang in the middle of the doomed-to-failure plan.

The tone of the novel moves from tragic (the fall of Saigon and the death of Bon’s family), to dark to absurdist. It’s written in a twisty-turny style with several digressions for commenting on cultural quirks of both the Vietnamese and the Americans. It is also very unpredictable… and unputdownable.

The Sympathizer

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Publisher: Grove Press

Pages: 371 

The One-in-a-Million Boy

Scout’s Honour

Most people must have forgotten all about Boy Scouts and their do-gooding; it is at the core of Monica Wood’s heartwarming novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy.

The eleven-year-old boy in the book remains unnamed for some reason and always referred to as “the boy.” He is  pale, thin, wide-eyed autistic wonder boy with a penchant for lists, a passion for the Guiness Book of Records and the remarkable ability to empathise with and befriend an old woman.

Ona Vitkus is the real heroine of the novel—she is 104 years old of Lithuanian origin, but she has little recollection of her childhood. She is healthy for her age and lives alone, satisfied with her lot till the boy appears at her doorstep with his overenthusiastic scout master, Ted Ledbetter. She has rejected several helpers for laziness or slovenliness, but the boy, with his willingness to work, meticulousness and politeness wins her heart. The boy awakens in her a desire to live longer and make it to the Guiness Book of Records; he also nudges her memory for her life gone by and coaxes her to reveal her the story and her long-buried secrets on tape for his school project on grandparents. A few pages into the novel, the boy dies. His father Quinn is made to go to Ona’s house by his grieving twice-ex-wife Belle, to finish the boy’s assignment.

Quinn, a musician, always on the road with his gigs, wasn’t much of a father to the boy, and after the two divorces from Belle is even more of an absentee dad. The child’s death evokes latent guilt in him with results in his going to Ona’s aid and forming an even stronger friendship with her than his son.

Ona is determined to fulfill the boy’s desire to see her name in the famous book of records, but she needs documents to prove her age, which she does not have. Quinn is coerced into taking her on a long journey to retrieve her birth certificate, which her firstborn might have.  Belle joins in and the trip makes the parents evaluate their own lives.  It’s as if, through his death, the boy gave meaning and a sense of purpose to the people who loved him.

Monica Wood writes with acuity about her characters, the boy, Ona, Quinn, Belle, Ted and the others who cross their paths, including a bunch of gospel rockers Quinn works with on and off. The tragedy of the boy’s death soaks through the pages, but never overwhelms its tone of gentle humour. Neither does the novel ever get mawkish, even though it is about coping with grief. The One-in-a-Million Boy is highly recommended.

The One-in-a-Million Boy

By Monica Wood

Published by Headline

Pages: 406