Bookworm, no. 102
Alexander Sallas reviews Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher’s “Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al.” Roxane Hudon on Miranda Schreiber’s “Iris and the Dead.” Poetry by Bob Weber. Inside the July/August issue.
Meet the Marxes
Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al.: This Is Not a Book about Marx
Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher
Translated by Mélissa Bull
Between the Lines Books
50 pages, softcover and ebook
In the popular imagination, Karl Marx toiled at his desk over essays, manifestos, and sprawling tomes. Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher, a magazine editor in Montreal, thinks the real picture looked different. Originally published in French in 2020, Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al. spotlights the overlooked women whose contributions and sacrifices shaped—and were shaped by—Marx’s intellectual pursuits.
Chief among them is Marx’s wife, Jenny. A voracious reader of sharp intellect and “acid humour,” she edited and transcribed her husband’s work for most of her life. Although she undertook these tasks willingly, she felt deep ambivalence toward her role, “torn between her ideals and the constraints of her everyday life.” The couple’s three daughters were “erudite, polyglot, and steadfast activists” who all met tragic ends. The eldest, nicknamed Jennychen, helped popularize her father’s output, but died at thirty-eight after the traumatic delivery of her sixth child. Laura, Marx’s second born, who translated The Communist Manifesto into French, fulfilled a suicide pact with her husband at sixty-six. Eleanor, the youngest, was a staunch feminist and industrious political organizer who pushed for socialism in England. She poisoned herself at forty-three. Comparing Eleanor’s smarts and drive with her father’s, Lefebvre-Faucher concludes, “Had she been born a boy, this child would have vied for his own mark in history so much that we would today be talking about the Marxes.”
The “et al.” of the title refers to other women in Marx’s orbit, among them Helene Demuth, the family’s long-time housekeeper and confidante. (Some historians believe she bore Marx’s illegitimate child.) Supported by archival photographs and abundant footnotes, Lefebvre-Faucher’s arguments compel readers to rethink the myth that Marxism was the product of one man’s genius. In that respect, this slim volume succeeds in her broad mission to recognize “literary negatives” and to uncover “the hidden participation of muses, secretaries, and mothers.”
—Alexander Sallas
Piece of Mind
Iris and the Dead
Miranda Schreiber
Book*hug Press
184 pages, softcover and ebook
What does depression feel like? In her debut novel, Miranda Schreiber depicts it as a sort of madness, an inner wickedness, a flatness. Split into confessional vignettes, Iris and the Dead is an imaginative, heartbreaking portrait of mental illness.
Reading Schreiber’s book feels like stumbling on a friend’s diary—albeit one written in a lyrical style: “I was a quarter of a person, but everyone else stayed whole, continuing to partake in their mysterious consensus about what was happening and what was not.” Most of the entries are directed at Iris, a counsellor with whom the unnamed narrator develops an obsessive relationship. “You trapped me, sealing me in a chamber by the water. You made sure I’d be nowhere for years, stuck longing for the things I believed, at that time, should have been ours,” the narrator writes. As she heals, the storyline shifts toward the fantastical. She is no longer possessed by depression and unrequited love, but by the memories of her dead ancestors. Schreiber conveys the narrator’s inherited trauma through dreamlike sequences where ghosts mingle with mythical figures.
Uncanny and captivating, Iris and the Dead weaves beauty into the darkness. “Strange images came to me, dispatched by a force beyond my control,” the narrator confesses. “It takes a long time to adapt to the return of a mind. It is not a natural transition. Like a transplanted organ, the body’s instinct is to reject it.” Schreiber’s words will haunt those familiar with the feeling long after they’ve finished her slim novel.
—Roxane Hudon
From the Archives: Whose Menu Is It Anyway?
Hungry for some Canadian content this July 1? Feast on J.R. Patterson’s review of Kimberley Moore and Janis Thiessen’s Mmm . . . Manitoba, as well as Jane Morrigan and Susan Ivany’s LaHave Bakery, from our November 2024 issue.
Poet’s Corner
Icarus Flies Economy
My name is Icarus, seat 47D.
Last time I flew I fell into the sea,
But that day I sailed so free and high
I swore one day I’d return to the sky.
And sort of, I have. Packed in this metal tube
For hours. I can barely move.
I’ve got movies and booze to help me relax.
But still, I miss my wings of wax.
—Bob Weber lives in Edmonton, where he recently retired from the Canadian Press. Find more of his work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the July/August Issue
“Trust is a story only when it is slipping away. It is tricky even to speak of trust without destroying it: ask someone, ‘Do you trust me?’ and watch their brow furrow.” Irina Dumitrescu reviews Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations.
Graham Fraser on François Charbonneau’s L’affaire Cannon: Enquête sur le combat d’un médecin afro-américain contre la discrimination raciale au Château Frontenac.
“The strength of the book as a retrospective stems from its willingness to look at the institution it’s celebrating from unflattering angles.” Noah Ciubotaru reviews Concordia University at 50: A Collective History, edited by Monika Kin Gagnon and Brandon Webb.
And much more!
By the Way
In Bookworm, no. 101, we credited Laura Boyle for designing the cover of Benjamin Libman’s The Third Solitude. We’ve since learned Karen Alexiou did. Likewise, we said that Arthur Duarte designed the cover of Christine Wu’s Familial Hungers. Duarte drew the art, but Natalie Olsen designed the cover.