Book Review

By Derryll White

Ruddock, Nicholas (2010). The Parabolist.

“Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs on white pebbles!”          – Roberto Bolano. ‘The Savage Detectives’

The above is what this volume opens with. My luck continues as people give me interesting books to read. Hot Shots in Cranbrook is a hotbed of this wonderful behaviour. It is really quite fortunate as it opens me to things I might not otherwise come upon.

Ruddock continues a fairly recent emerging Canadian trend; doctors who write.   Ruddock is a practicing physician and that sense of inquiry and discipline informs his writing. He clearly embodies the recent educational trend he mentions in the novel, the quest of the university to broaden young doctors’ backgrounds by including arts courses in the study curriculum.

Ruddock takes the time to build strong characters, characters with depth and definition. By doing this he is able to invoke surprise at will, such as the professor’s older wife who says of fellatio in the backyard – “One time out of a hundred you get caught for a move like that. Go for it, I say.”

I enjoy the contrasts that Ruddock sets up so subtly. They let the novel read on an unconscious level, until suddenly the reader goes – “Wait a minute!” One of those moments happened for me when I read the poet Keats’s epitaph in the text – Here lies One Whose Name was writ in water. In my mind that quiet humility ran up against the heat and passion of the parabolist poets, and I was left again examining my own life. I love it when a writer does that to me.

I appreciate the author’s throw-away lines, such as: “Love has a thousand faces, and most of them are blind.”

This is a curious book. It would probably be categorized in the mystery genre, but it is much more than that. It is a love story, a rambling poem of possibilities. It is a complex dissertation on the strengths, abuse of and rights of women. Most of all, however, it is a lyrical story of what can be done when individuals stretch to grasp their full potential. I really liked this novel.

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Excerpts from the novel:

PARABOLISTS: Is that a part of parabolism, not to have a book?

It works out the same because parabolists are a lot like attack dogs and they are not popular with publishers.

LIVING: You know as well as I do that you can’t judge the quality of a life by its length. Look at Keats, Chopin, Chekhov. I’d prefer to judge the quality of a life by by love, by passion.

SOCIETY: The imperfections of our society in Canada are more subtle, said Valerie. You don’t see them here, they’re papered over. Things happen here, though, on a personal level, that are as painful as they would be anywhere.

POETRY: Let me say this, said Robert Moreno, all contributions to the interpretation of a poem are welcome. Poetry is fraught with difficulty. Especially in translation. Some translations are equally at home in both languages yet others, including the maestro, Ezra Pound, could not speak any of the languages of Chinese when he wrote his versions of the poetry of Li Po and Lao-tzu. So, if Jasper finds something amusing where no one else does, let it be.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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