How To Love Your Daughter

HOW TO LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER
Hila Blum
Bloomsbury

REVIEWED BY JESSIE NEILSON

This quiet, bleak work by Israeli novelist Hila Blum won her country's Sapir Prize. It has been translated from the Hebrew, and this version retains the soulfulness of a mother and daughter relationship damaged beyond repair.

Worry is a straitjacket and so is love. Yoella Linden lives in Israel while her estranged only child Leah is in Holland with husband Yohan and young daughters, Lotte and Sanne. It has taken some exertions for Yoella to find this out. Leah has been gone for years, ostensibly travelling through the world on an extended OE, but in reality stationary most of the time.

For more than six years, Leah had male companions ring home, reassuring her mother that all was well. Yoella does not know when the duplicity slowly dawned on her, having no understanding of motive. Now Leah lives a comfortable middle-class life, married, like her mother had been, to a much older academic. Yet of the two granddaughters not a word is spoken, Yoella gleaning all from hours of online detective work. One day she makes her way to their neighbourhood, watching her granddaughters, tantalising close.

Her daughter is crucified by the window frame, just out of reach and oblivious.

This is Yoella's heartfelt account as she pores over details from Leah's childhood to try to understand where she went wrong as a mother. Like any mother to a young child, Yoella has been infatuated by her, marking her daughter's growth and discoveries as she ventured into the world. Later she watched as Leah felt her own way, where she ‘‘wandered the world picking and plucking’’. Once they had been so close, Leah confiding everything. These days, Yoella has been almost completely erased, and her daughter has made herself a brand new life.

Yoella dwells on the minute: was it an offhand comment? Her overly wholehearted, unconditional support? Her smothering, almost lack of space? It is left to guesswork. Neither Yoella nor the reader is privy to the daughter's version, so we must speculate too.

The angst, the sapping malaise, is evident in the narration, sometimes sparse, at other times overflowing. Interactions and communications are now devoid of their agents. These ghosts of people have become experts at ‘‘culling comfort from . . . weightless light bulbs we carefully held up to illuminate us for a few moments, unwired, unconnected, powered not by electricity but by sheer will’’.

How to Love your Daughter is a story gasping with its silences and hurts. The first part is sometimes slow as the narrator ponders the wreckage of her relationship, lost in the muddle of it all. It gathers pace and substance however as more concrete details are filled out, to complement the internal ruminations. One is left wordless at the daughter's apparent wholehearted callousness. Yoella speaks of not knowing where to steer the drama she has set in motion, though her actions are no more than a mothering reflex to heal.

They might be exhaustive, but her words and overflowing emotions look to fall deeper into the abyss, her ‘‘crime’’ perhaps one no one even can locate.

Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant