Sheridan Griswold
18 September 2009
book review
Gaborone — The Rowing Lesson earned Anne Landsman this year's Sunday Times fiction award. It was promoted recently in Botswana as part of a selection of new books of merit from South Africa. The Rowing Lesson was written at the "Writer's Room" a non-profit urban writer's colony in New York City where she now lives and where she continues to write.
Landsman's first novel Devil's Chimney (1997) is narrated by a middle-aged alcoholic named Connie and is about events in South Africa (not Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England) at the turn of the century and Beatrice who bore a child in mysterious circumstances.
The Rowing Lesson is dedicated to the author's father Gerald. It is a work of fiction that is exceptional in a number of ways. First, it explores new territory in the use of the English language. Second, it uses a mixture of words from the canon of medical lore that require no knowledge of scientific terminology to appreciate, as they can be enjoyed for their sound and poetry. Third, it is an exploration of the ways events in adolescence reverberate through the course of a life - in this case the Touw River at Wilderness and the passage to its source at Ebb 'n Flow.
Betsy Klein received her rowing lesson from her father Harold (Harry) Klein below Ebb 'n Flow. Betsy, now years later, is speaking to her father. "The sea is the breathe of your body, the tide going in as you breathe in, the tide going out, as you exhale. Now and forever. You are bound here, caught in the crook of the land. The river runs straight into your heart, the vena cava bringing blood without oxygen to be renewed and restored, renewed and restored" (page 60). The lesson is in 1967 and is cut short by a storm.
"You know this rainy afternoon will paste itself into your life as a special day, the day you taught me to row and you and I got stuck in the boat in the rain and I crawled into the front and made my self so small you thought you could keep me forever" (page 65).
Your grandfather was a Jewish carpenter from Lithuania. Your father had a general store in George, The House for Quality and Value. He bought a 1938 Chrysler Imperial, named it Charlotte and took all the family along the coastal rode to Wilderness. There Wolfie gives you his boat to row up the river along with Morry, Bunny, Hilda, Maisie and the pulchritudinous Gertrude - you were already fascinated by breasts, and now you were surrounded by them. You are captain of the red-and-white boat to Ebb 'n Flow for a picnic your mother has prepared. The undersides of the Knysna loeries are bright and red; so is the spot in Gertrude's dress. Your destroy Mom's tablecloth to help Gertrude. On the way back the rain comes pelting down - "Gertrude crawls into the little prow of Wolfie's boat".
"You have been rained on during picnics ... and yes, on the river, so many times on the river. Of course your ma will be nervous about you getting sick, about your lungs and your heart, not to mention your nose, which points east then south, and has its own shadow. And that's another reason you want to become a doctor" (page 19).
It is now 40 years later, and Dr Harold Klein is dying of one of the three rare Paget's Diseases, not of his beloved breasts or the vulva, but of the bones, turned into brittle bamboo by the cancer. Odd, as a medical student, "It was the bone that sickened you, more than anything else" (page 195). Betsy, who is pregnant with her first child, has flown from New York to be with her father during his last days. He'd told her on his one and only visit to the city that he had Paget's. Now Dokter God is a patient where he'd studied medicine starting in 1938.
When you visited NYC you found Betsy was taking homeopathic medicines, and you, still an allopathic fool addicted to magic bullets, decreed your daughter a "throwback to the 19th century" and flushed them all down the toilet. "My pills aren't good enough for you?
Penicillin would have saved your grandfather's life, you ungrateful little bitch! Dad you are not my doctor. Of course I'm your doctor. I'm your father, for God's sake! Stop, I was screaming now ... Your mother was right. I should never have come. This whole country is for the birds" (page 35).
Medical school "is where the dead teach the living". Five men and one woman, Dorothy, to your cadaver whom you name Grootouma, Greatgrandma. Professor Clark observes your fascination in her giant breasts and teases you. "He is looking at you, his eyebrows bent like seagull wings, as he is observing a hairless primate on the veld. Mammary mammal. Her breasts (more like elephant ears) are on the skew, the left smaller than the right, the nipples thumbing something rude you can't hear" ... on the first incisions the team falls overboard, but "they laugh as they cling to the sides of the boat ... Dorothy is now so sharp and thin she could cut Grootouma with her finger nails and the thin trembling wires of her hair ... There's Ebb n' Flow where the river begins, folded into the dense bush, the trickle curling its way out that lobe of glandular tissue. And here's where it opens into the sea ..." (pages 129 and 130). Dorothy fascinates you, but she its not amused when reaching for her lipstick to pick up Geelbek's penis taken from another cadaver in the anatomy laboratory. You are the only honest one when Professor Man-Bird who teaches Medicine tries to fool your lot on the ward when examining a live patient. He wants you to realise that it is "more important to know what sort of person has a disease that to know what sort of disease a person has". You cannot feel the spleen while the other students say they can. "Why is the spleen not enlarged, but completely absent from the scene?" (page 152).
When your first ward patient doesn't make it to Ebb n Flow, what do you say to the wife? "Tell her any story you like but don't tell her that you killed him." You learn a litany of fears. "Fear of the Terrible Black Dark stabs Little Fear of My Own Death who's chasing Fear of Everyone's Death who's been led by the nose by Fear of the Powers That Be.
Somewhere in the middle of the pack is Fear of Failing, desperately holding hands with Fear of Singing out of Tune, who looks like a bandicoot with a crooked snout. They can't even march properly, which is Fear of Doing the Wrong Thing's very worst fear" (pages 137 and 138).
The good doctor sets up practice in Worcester, having pursued another woman, Stella who sends you "up the river all over again, with the stained tablecloth and the yearning burning all over the world". You are challenged to count her freckles. "Stella is the rose among the thorns, the one and only kitty cat, the prize girl ... the secret place you are taking her to is almost as good as Ebb 'n Flow" (page 160). Your friend Maxie writes you a note, "Where do the spots end, Doc?" (page 174). Little did you know that this would lead to her becoming your wife and Betsy's and her siblings' mother. Later Stella "hated it when you spoke about the past, which you did all the time, and how jolly life was without her, life before her, life when you were just a boy from George" (page 86). "Those were the best years of my life, Stella" (page 143).
Dying you return to Koeka. "This is the cruelest cut of all. In all your years of practicing medicine, you have never seen breasts so perfectly formed, a waist so supple, legs that curve and twist and bend in all the right places. Koeka's nipples are miniature roses and there's a green mossy beard between her legs" (page 212). There is always the Fear of Terrible Things Happening. Eventually they take over, as this novel will embrace you.
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