Cure By Katherine Brabon Review – Moments Of Grace In Meditation On Chronic Illness

Katherine Brabon’s 4th caller follows a mother and girl pinch a shared acquisition of chronic unwellness who recreation to Italy successful hunt of a cure. It feels for illustration a companion portion to her elegant erstwhile caller Body Friend, about 3 women who activity retired different ways of managing their chronic symptom aft surgery. Cure continues Brabon’s metaphoric usage of doubles, mirrors and reflections to research nan societal dimensions of nan assemblage successful pain. It opens successful Lake Como, where, we are told, successful autumn “clouds devour nan hills astir nan lake” and nan h2o “reflects nan segment of disappearance. [It] cannot thief but replicate nan obscuring fog.” Vera has been present before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a mini municipality successful Lombardy, wherever she herself travelled pinch her parents arsenic a sick teen, to activity retired an obscure man who promises to heal and cure group of their illnesses.

Cure captures nan achy intimacies betwixt a mother and daughter: “Vera has lived this, aliases a type of this, but she wants it to beryllium different for her daughter,” Brabon writes. Vera and Thea are allied successful their shared acquisition of chronic headaches, fatigue and joints stiffened pinch pain. Both person been subjected to nan banal wellness proposal of others – to return acold showers, basking baths, debar java and devour tea. At nan aforesaid clip nan brace are estranged – Thea wants to rebel against Vera’s anxious and protective proscriptions; Vera favours curatives specified arsenic “supplement powders, tablets, and tea” complete nan prescribed medications recommended by her expert husband.

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The gentle and unassuming communicative shifts betwixt Vera’s teen visit to Italy and her daughter’s, and betwixt sequences from Vera’s early adulthood and scenes of nan mother and kid astatine location successful Melbourne. Vera is taken to a thermal bath successful location Victoria by her parents, and spends hours connecting pinch different young women online. In Italy, Thea rests and walks to nan lake, gathering a teenage boy called Santo. Writing successful her journal, she reflects upon really her mother’s travel maps neatly connected to her own: nan aforesaid age, nan aforesaid bed, a shared illness, a shared purpose. To Vera, her girl is simply a “just a body”: “a reflector of her ain assemblage … she cannot spot beyond nan body, its destruction, its inheritance”.

Thea and Vera’s nights are long, edged pinch pain; nan days are repetitious, spent managing that burden. Brabon is delicate to really clip tin dissolve successful these efforts of maintenance, bracketing nan hours pinch impermanent relief. Vera partakes successful a fortnightly authorities of subcutaneous injections, while Thea relies connected painkillers to alleviate nan “fatigue and fever and aching eyelids”. As she swallows nan tablets, she “feels her mother travel backmost to her”. In this cyclical acquisition of illness, Thea looks to Vera arsenic a template of what will come.

In Thea, Brabon draws a delicate image of a woman adjusting to life successful a assemblage that will beryllium constrained. Vera is simply a analyzable figure, anxious and tired, whose work for her girl some draws them together and drives them apart. They move to penning arsenic a intends of connection and escape: Thea retreats into her journal, diarising her ain adolescence and crafting stories astir her mother; Vera appeals to online communities, wherever she tin stock her ain acquisition anonymously. This concealed retreat into imagination is driven by necessity, for it is location that mother and girl are free to ideate their lives pinch a supple and mysterious hope.

Vera and Thea must unrecorded slowly, carefully, and nan communicative reproduces this successful its building – to enervating effect. Between sequences of Vera and Thea successful nan past and coming are italicised passages told from an estranged, omniscient perspective. The brace go “mother and daughter”, “the woman” and “the girl”. Thea’s upset slumber and swollen knees, initially presented to nan scholar pinch first-hand intimacy, are reconsidered pinch toneless neutrality, a level recital of events: “The woman feels some happy and angry”; “the woman walks to nan lake”. In adopting this benignant of glacial formalism, Brabon possibly seeks to seizure nan effects of bodily estrangement pinch nan sage reticence of a writer for illustration Rachel Cusk, whose caller Parade is quoted successful nan epigraph. Instead, these italicised passages execute thing much dry, excessively narrow. The warmer haze of Brabon’s different prose amended captures nan feelings of rupture and dissociation brought astir by nan sick assemblage and by nan family successful conflict.

Brabon’s play pinch narration successful Cure signals her subtle exploration of really stories of sickness tin beryllium confining, excessively definitive. Shifting our attraction to nan sick assemblage beyond pathology, she re-engages pinch nan relational and affective qualities of this experience, sketching a dim world, foggy pinch illusion and mythmaking. Narrative strength is stripped backmost for thing softer, much reflective. If nan novel’s cautiously refined ambiance is sometimes distant to a fault, it besides contains arresting moments of grace, arsenic Brabon meditates connected nan stories we show astir our bodies, wellness, treatment and memory.

• Cure by Katherine Brabon is retired done Ultimo Press ($34.99)