In Fond Remembrance of Me
Howard Norman
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 North Point Press
ISBN: 0865476802

A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic.

The Introduction to this little tome starts out: “On November 8, 1977, in the Halifax train station... Helen Tanizaki handed me a letter from the afterlife. At least that is the impression she intended by its title, In Fond Remembrance of Me, written on the envelope. "Do not open until..." she had... no need to complete the sentence; I knew how it ended. She had been diagnosed with fatal stomach cancer and was going home to spend her final months... in Kyoto, Japan.”

& so evolved this homage to Howard Norman's friend who was a “linguist, translator, diarist, prodigious writer of letters, who had lived and worked through the Canadian arctic as well as Greenland and Siberia.” Translating the people's myths, songs, poems & life histories, & amassing an informal record of the birds she'd seen.

They had not known of each other's existence before that August when they'd met at the Beluga Hotel along the Churchill River in Manitoba, where they discovered they were on the same mission -- he hired by an American museum, she by a Japanese publisher -- to translate the narratives told by Mark Nuqac, an Inuit Elder who lived on the western coast of Hudson Bay.

Howard Norman was 28 at the time, born in Toledo, Ohio, while Helen Tanizaki was 39, born in London(UK) & raised in Japan, with a PhD in linguistics. “In most respects we were from opposite ends of the earth.” (p.4)

“I knew during that autumn something interesting was happening in my life, but on reflection I can scarcely claim that at the time I had even a modest comprehension of just how much intellectual -- and, yes, spiritual --- life Helen had introduced me to.” (ibid)

This book contains eleven narratives told by Mark Nuqac. He called them “my Noah stories” -- what happened to the Biblical fellow when his ark, empty of all except his wife & children (the two-by-two animals having been consumed on the long voyage), got stuck in the ice of Mark Nuqac's ancestors' land. By summer's end, Howard Norman had heard 23 variations with only these surviving the Inuit group's ok.

While I was interested with what Howard Norman recorded about being in Churchill, the “Noah” tales were predictable -- don't get me wrong -- they're all different except... I kept getting the feeling Howard Norman, & by extension I, was royally having our collective legs pulled. By what the author includes of Helen Tanizaki's comments, I got the feeling she did too, & it didn't bother her.

Written from a long after hindsight, while referring to his journals & Helen Tanizaki's letters to him in the remaining months of her life, In Remembrance of Me tells of a young scholar's venture into the unknown who, by his own words, was woefully unprepared. & by reading between the lines, you witness how he was suckered by a “professional” Native with dollar signs in his eyes.

Was I impressed? I'm not sure -- although I got the feeling I ought to be. I was most certainly impressed by Helen Tanizaki's broad visions of arctic life, her charming turns of phrases, & by her rage at having her life cut short. I was certainly saddened that no books by her are listed on Amazon US, UK or Japan.

The rest of In Remembrance of Me? A rather dour recounting of a coming-of-age era which supposedly changed this author's life, & glimpses into everyday life of a group of Canadian First People.

Nonetheless, this little book is a thought-provoking read.

More from Howard Norman:
The Northern Lights
The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese: And Other Tales of the Far North. Ages 9-12
The Chauffeur: Stories
Between Heaven and Earth: Bird Tales from Around the World, illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon. Ages 9-12
My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations
The Haunting of L: A Novel
(06/04/06)

Rebecca