Claudia
by Britt Holmström
Regina: Coteau Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-55050-395-1, 343 pp., $21 paper.

Claudia is a book with more than one murder in it. These killings have the potential of pushing a story into gloom, but this work is an engaging one from the first page and does not falter, thanks to Holmström's writing. It moves effortlessly with flashes of imagery that evoke beauty when least expected. She also writes with a biting humour that adds a refreshing dimension to the story that, surprisingly, for all it entails, ends on a confident note. You have the feeling you are sitting down with a dear friend and having a good conversation with a strong cup of tea for fortitude.

While waiting for the arrival of the new millennium, Claudia Hewitt witnesses from an attic window the consequences of a murder. And what occurs in the park opposite her home brings back memories of other murders that have occurred in her life. Thus, Claudia, in her early senior years and the narrator of the novel, conjures up the past and begins to reminisce.

Born in war-torn Latvia occupied by the Nazis, Claudia escapes with her mother, Malda, to Sweden before the Soviet invasion. She leaves her beleaguered relatives and the only knowledge she has of her father, who was "Claudio, an Italian boy who plays the clarinet" (18).

Claudia and her mother settle into a not uncomfortable life in Sweden, where her mother trains as a nurse. Malda meets Ed Lee, a doctor visiting from Canada, an open-hearted and generous man, whom she later marries. Eventually he brings them to Canada and the prairies.

Shortly after their arrival, Claudia and her mother drive beyond Winnipeg's city limits to test Malda's new car and they see only the flat stretch of prairie; "the sight of infinity proved too much for Mama" (29). They return home disturbed by the discovery.

As a young adult, Claudia earns a degree as a social worker; later she travels to Spain for a holiday. She meets an old friend from Sweden and makes new friends from America. Then her old school friend is murdered. But this is not the first murder; there was another killing of another school friend when Claudia lived in Sweden. The murders prove shocking and haunt her for years afterwards. These acts of violence and the war-related violence recur throughout the novel and raise the question of atrocities mankind wages upon its own kind.

It is the everyday living of the narrator and her family that brings some kindness and mercy to the situations that spring up. Of her first encounter with her future husband, Simon, Claudia says with sharp humour: "A gigantic mallet slammed down on my head and I was out for the count. How else to describe it?" (66) Claudia and Simon bear their children and guide them to adulthood that is not without problems. Life goes on and then one day Malda and Claudia are widows, Claudia at first angry in her grieving of her husband's sudden death: "Oh, Simon. You vain, stupid bastard." (77)

And then Malda surprises Claudia with a request to visit her beloved Latvia. Their journey takes them to Riga and to the past, which is also their future. They meet Nelda, a niece. Again we are thrust into the world of violence, this time into the world of sex slavery, and we come to ask; how does a person acquire the courage to walk from such degradation and horror of her past life? And how does she gain the dignity so deserving to her? Holmström introduces a bit of magic here and it works and we can believe there is hope for the human individual after all.

While in Riga, Claudia learns that a person wears life like a good coat: "And from somewhere she [Malda] reaches out and hangs her strength . . . over my shoulders. Drapes it around me like a good coat with a fox-fur collar, the kind that will last if you take proper care of it." (285) It is this same strength Claudia's mother gives her that allows her also to make peace with herself over the murders that have haunted her for several decades.

Claudia is a book worth reading for Holmström's intense insights into the human condition and all its follies, for its prickly humour and for the sense it leaves at the conclusion that it is good to be human.

Mary Barnes is a writer living in Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


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