Catherine Bush (1)Reseñas

When Claire Barber learns that her older sister, Rachel, has vanished, she disrupts her life in Toronto to follow news of her sister to New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Italy, Las Vegas and Mexico. Claire is worried that Rachel's severe and worsening migraines may have pushed her over the edge. Claire also suffers from migraines and her search for her sister becomes an emotional journey. This novel explores how we live with pain, how much we can bear and what we would be willing to give up to free ourselves from it. I really liked the character development and exploration of living with pain.

From the back of the book:

"While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children's circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations.

With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada's finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover "the truth." After a friend of Sara's begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past."

Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.

Catherine Bush is a beautiful, intellectual writer whose attention to craft just shines off every page. Consider this character description: There was a touch of self-consciousness in the way he used his voice, as if he were playing an instrument, yet his warmth and combination of fervour and charm overtook whatever was manipulative. He breathed out a generosity that made him the kind of man you felt compelled to watch." After reading hundreds of books with throw-away descriptions about how tall someone is, or what color their hair is, what a relief it is to find myself in the hands of a masterful prose-smith.

Beyond the wonderful technical aspects of the book, Bush tackles the big moral, ethical questions. A man is accused of a reprehensible crime. How does one defend oneself against accusation? She says, "What did true denial sound like? If accused, you were speaking always, into the wind of the possiblity of not being believed, you had to try to convince your listener, and anything might sound defensive or overcompensatory or strident, you battered yourself against the wall of what you had not done but others claimed you had, and somehow you had to dissolve the wall or leap over it.. . . What was it that Raymond Renaud had said in teh car that July night, something about how when people believe a thing to be true it is very hard to convince them it isn't. It is very difficult to prove something in the negative: I did not do it. Had he spoken with the vehemence of someone who'd already had an experience of trying to counter another's claim, of not being believed.?"

At first I wasn't convinced she'd chosen the right narrator. Sara is a peripheral narrator, although her job as a journalist gives her more opportunity both to ferret out the truth and to (inadvertently) possibly become part of the story. However, I was soon won over. By having the reader experience the story through Sara, we are allowed to doubt as she doubts, to cry out for justice as she does, to feel her ambivalence and to question our own ability to find the truth. It's a risky choice, but one that works, and I tip my hat to her.

It's a book that makes you think, and keeps you turning pages. Recommended.

This is a very powerful novel about accusations; about how, once made, accusations linger in the public realm, and in the relationship between people who believe or reject the accusation.

Sara, a Canadian reporter, happens upon an Ethiopian circus and is immediately charmed and amazed by the child performers. She later meets the man (fellow Canadian Raymond Renaud) who runs the circus and trains the children, who would otherwise likely live in poverty.

Later, serious allegations of sexual abuse are made against Raymond, and Sara is unsure what to believe. Her feelings are complicated as she was once falsely accused of a more minor crime.

Sparsely written, leaving room for different interpretations...this is a very good book.

Complicated analysis of how an accusation or allegation of wrongdoing can alter a person's life forever. The protagonist is a free lance journalist who had once been wrongfully accused of stealing a wallet from another woman at the Y, so she is very sensitive to the impacts as she investigates allegations of physical and sexual abuse by the leader of a children's circus in Ethiopia and also leaders of orphanages in Africa. Satisfactory read which at times rises to very interesting.½

In this face-paced world of technology and communications, applying a label to someone without giving a second thought has become a hurtful and dangerous task. Catherine Bush has looked at the anguish and hurt of individuals who have been wrongfully labeled and created a complex and wonderful piece of literature in her novel Accusation.

Page 10-11

She knew nothing for certain. It was only an accusation. Abuse: the article didn't specify what kind. Yet, as she knew, an accusation, regardless of truth, has its own life when let loose in the world. Experience had taught her this. The words, released, went on uncoiling themselves. A pulse rapped in her head.
What to do?
Do nothing. Or call Juliet Levin to tell her what she had discovered.

The story deals with the allegations of physical and sexual abuse around a circus founder based in Ethiopia. But as the search for the truth grows, the protagonist recalls her own encounters with false accusations and tries to deal with her own personal issues with family and friends.

Link to my complete review

listening was perhaps not the best for this novel plus the abridgement.

From the book back cover:

Arcadia Hearne is a researcher who studies contemporary war and specializes in issues of military intervention. Far from her hometown of Toronto, she has created a new life for herself in London. While she pursues the study of violence, surveying the rich arsenal of current global conflicts, she refuses to put herself either physically or emotionally at risk. Thrust into a world full of people who, like her, hide secrets and are in flight from difficult pasts, Arcadia is compelled both to contemplate new possibilities for intervention and to confront her own painful history.

This one took some time for me to immerse myself in. The prose is intelligent and elegant, interspersed with a philosophical examination of love and conflict. We learn slowly through a series of memory flashbacks why Arcadia fled Toronto and watch as the compulsion within her to face this past grows. It is the exploration of what one is willing to risk and how that made this story a compelling read for me. "It isn't just a matter of risk. Given that you can't act everywhere, do everything, just as you can't intervene in all conflicts, you have to determine your zones of responsibility. That's what we grapple with in intervention studies. You have to choose where you're going to take your risks, set limits. As you travel from zones of safety into zones of danger. That's what makes risk meaningful." Arcadia's shift from safety into zones of danger is triggered when her sister Lux asks her to deliver a package to a refugee from Somalia. Arcadia's personal examination of risks and her boundaries is central to the story.

Arcadia was not an easy character for me to connect with. The daughter of a nuclear engineer, she is an armchair war expert that has never visited the global conflict zones her work focuses on. Never witnessed first hand the brutalities of the civil war in the southern Sudan, the bodies pulled from the mass graves in Srebrenica, the Bosnian refugee camp rape victims. Instead, she deals in the methodical and moralistic examination of how warfare and conflict is personalized, an interesting profession for one whose coping mechanism when faced with an event during her university days is to flee to England and turn her back on the event. When she does decide to face her personal conflict, it is for a self-serving purpose that grated against my sensibilities.

That aside, Bush does an excellent job in taking the cold, impersonal, methodical examination of warfare and transposing this onto the emotional and personal examination of conflict in the arena of love, making what some will call a cliched approach to the topic refreshingly different to read. My favorite quote from the book: "I used to long for love as a clear and steady state, though perhaps there is no love that does not hold the seed of something else - just as there is no steady state of the body, and no state at all without some inconsistency, some internal contradiction, some trace of weather patterns, the possibility of migration or other turbulence. Perhaps the question is simply whether love enfolds an ambivalence you can live with, or one you can't."

Overall, not an easy story as it requires a commitment from the reader to delve into a philosophical discussion of warfare but worth the time and effort to read.

For all you migraine sufferers and non sufferers, this is a great book. Ms Bush is a relatively new Canadian writer and this is her 3rd book. She is best known for her previous book, The Rules of Engagement, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and named one of the best books of the year by the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Claire is one of 3 sisters who grow up in Toronto. Two of them , Claire and Rachel, suffer from migraines, as did their mother. Claire in Toronto and Rachel in New York struggle to live their lives, work, form relationships and survive despite a significant disability which can strike at any time and does so frequently. Rachel becomes increasingly desperate to fight the relentless monster in her head. Then she disappears and Claire sets out to find her. She follows a trail from Montreal to Europe to New York and beyond. Her job and her lover are put on hold as she seeks to find Rachel before it is too late.
The graphic descriptions of symptoms and onset will strike home with migraine sufferers as they did with me. There is however a very compelling description of human pain avoidance in the persons of Rachel and Claire, the desperate attempt to avoid anything and everything that seems to be a trigger to such terrible pain. You start with the basics, red wine, cheese, move to eliminate alcohol and tobacco, strong cologne, cleaning smells, bus exhaust, plastic and on and on until your life is one giant avoidance pattern. Still, it isn't good enough and more self sacrifice is necessary. How far can you go? This book explores some of those questions as both sisters struggle for understanding and relief.

college student flees Toronto for London after duel fought over her

9.00