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In this month's Writers Read feature, Ania Szado, the author of Beginning of Was, reads Tricia Wastvedt's The River, a lyrical novel about friends, family, old wounds, and the emotional and social complexity of village life.
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In 1958, a young sister and brother hold each other quietly as their small boat disappears around them. The image of the children will ripple through decades of life in the village of Cameldip, exerting an emotional pull that is unending and intricate.
To say that their death is beautiful—for it is both exquisite and heartbreaking—is to hint at the emotional complexity of The River. This richly layered first novel by Tricia Wastvedt shifts from character to character, rendering each one with sensitivity and empathy, keeping the reader entranced.
Throughout, the writing is sensual, spare, and evocative. How can writing so gentle and subtle have such power? How does the author manage to hold and bind us so tightly? It is not through the mystery of what happened to the children, for their drowning comprises the first chapter. The question is, rather, whether it is possible to escape the effects of fear, anger, and guilt that pervade and distort life in the riverside village ... and what happens when an innocent enters its midst.
Meet Anna. In 1986, pregnant and emotionally riven, she sticks a pin in a map and finds herself leaving the city for Cameldip, where Isabel, an intriguing older woman, rents her a room. The room is actually a treehouse – the treehouse in which Isabel and her husband had made love, in 1958, before sleepily watching their children wander off to play at the river. Isabel is kind and solicitous to Anna. The two women grow close. Then Anna's child is born, and Isabel's attention shifts and intensifies. It may be love. It may be something far more alarming.
It takes Anna some time to discover the secrets and distortions that have grown from the seed of loss, and to uncover what lies behind Isabel's actions. As Anna drifts closer to and further from the truth, an entire community comes to life around her. One by one, we meet villagers who are somehow connected to Isabel and her husband, to their children, to Anna herself. Whether they know it or not, all are caught in the lingering ripples of the drowning, in the current of memory, and in the force of Isabel's relentless need to assuage her guilt.
Wastvedt does a masterful job of building her cast of characters. There are many, but none feels unnecessary; rather, each is a welcome addition that reveals another layer of village life, deepening our understanding even as he or she introduces another intrigue. We float mesmerized from one to the next, at times encountering repeated scenes—memories of love and loss that have echoed through the ages—until we feel how it is to live in Cameldip, to live with the Isabel's disturbing, sometimes terrifying, emotions. If nothing can undo the death of her children, can anything break the twisted power of her influence in the village? The River sweeps us along, spellbound, to the answer.
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 Ania Szado's first novel, Beginning of Was, was published in February 2004 to rave reviews. National Post called it, "an auspicious debut and a welcome addition to the range of contemporary Canadian novels that explore survival in the face of despair and loss." Her writing has been published in This Magazine, Flare, Taddle Creek, and the Lichen Literary Journal. She is currently working on her second novel.
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