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The Communist's Daughter (E-Book)

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Overview

From the acclaimed author of The Ash Garden--"an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect" (Newsday)--an even more ambitious novel that follows a doctor from the trenches of the Great War into subsequent conflicts whose horrors would soon envelop the world.

The historical Norman Bethune--legendary in both his native Canada and China--was a visionary whose dedication touched millions, and as the narrator of this novel he springs to vivid life even as he approaches its end. Rebelling in childhood against his father's religion, he finds a calling himself, saving lives on the battlefield, only after nearly losing his own in the trenches in France. In Republican Spain he fulfills his idealism, yet before long politics destroy a romance, compromise his achievement, and drive him to seek refuge and purpose in the vast expanse of China. Here, in the service of the man eventually known as Mao Zedong, Bethune contends with Nationalist and Japanese enemies and begins this account of failed loves, cherished beliefs, discoveries, and reversals for the only person who still makes a future seem possible: the daughter he has never seen.

Storytelling at its best--passionate, wrenching, compelling--about a complex, contradictory man caught in the relentless sweep of history.

Editorial Reviews

In this artful blend of fact and fiction, Bock (The Ash Garden) spins a stirring what-if story from the legendary--in Canada and China, at least--life of battlefield surgeon Norman Bethune. The Canadian-born doctor's disdain for "the doomed experiment of capitalism" took him to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists, and to China in 1938 to provide medical succor for Mao Tse-tung's ragtag army struggling against the Japanese. His life story, factually intact but fancifully imagined, is recounted through letters to a daughter Bethune never knew (and, historically, never had) written from China but never dispatched. Bock's vivid first-person narrative exquisitely captures the malice of war: Bethune's bloody WWI experiences, the horror of bombing raids during the Spanish Civil War and the numbing deprivation of Chinese peasants trapped between Mao's revolutionary army, the Japanese invaders and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. But the novel's most affecting moments stem from Bock's portrayal of the troubled soul of a war-weary idealist whose dreams of a better world were battered by ugly reality. The sound historical foundation will resonate with Canadian readers; U.S. readers will appreciate the story as powerful and affecting fiction. (Feb.)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Dennis Bock

Dennis Bock Dennis Bock was born on Lake Ontario, in the small town of Belleville, and moved from there with his family to Oakville, just west of Toronto, when he was six. He entered the University of Western Ontario after high school, and graduated with an Honors BA in English and Philosophy. He traveled to Madrid after college and began writing his collection of connected stories, Olympia, working on it while in residence at Yaddo, the Banff Centre and the Fundacion Valparadiso, Spain. It was published in 1998 by Bloomsbury US and UK, and by Doubleday Canada. It won several prizes in the UK and Canada. Olympia won the Jubilee Award and the Danuta Gleed Award in Canada, as well as the Betty Trask Prize UK in England. It was also a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year in 1998. The book was nominated for both the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Bock's novel The Ash Garden was the Winner of the 2002 Canada-Japan Literary Award Bock s short stories have also been published in literary magazines and anthologies. 030

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Additional Info

Imprint

Knopf

Filesize

745.35 KB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780307267382

Excerpt from: The Communist's Daughter (E-Book) by Dennis Bock

It is my hope that your understanding will win out against any mistrust or anger you may harbour against me when you finally read this. It is so easy to feel anger, and Lord knows I deserve a good dose of it. But I am trying, and you will see I have been trying for quite some time. I also hope that you will read this many years from now, when you are grown, at a time when this story will be long past. With an adult's eyes it is more likely that you will see this letter for what it is, and know the regret and tenderness I feel as I compose this history for you. Of course, I know I have no control over any of this, yet still I hope. The dead must relinquish so much.

Heaven forbid these pages return to you without me, but allowing for such a possibility I give you my word absolutely that I will recount my life as faithfully as I recall it, nothing added, nothing lost.

Will I be dead? That is certainly the way things seem to go around here, but it is not my intention to go off and die any time soon. You may also take some consolation in knowing that we Bethunes are fighters, first and foremost, and never go down without a mighty struggle. For a man nearing fifty I have got a good bit of life left in me.

The reality is that you have missed every word of the story I will tell, and I cannot change that fact. When such a small miracle as you awaited, I chose to look elsewhere for purpose. I chose to leave you behind, and that is the sadness in my life. I feel there is no adequate apology a father can offer his child for something like that, but it is my hope to tell you a little about the world as it was before you came into it, and about the terrible forces that pulled me away from you once you finally did. And to tell you why I came to this faraway country. One's journey through life is fraught with contradictions and compromises. I see that now, and perhaps one day you will see it too.



There is a boy here in north China with me named Ho. You would like him. The plain truth is that nothing would get done around here without him. He is my vigilant sentry, my water boy, my trusted valet, my cook, my barber. He is the one who provides me with everything I need. When he saw the state of this typewriter ribbon (I had been using the old Remington portable to write up a number of medical reports) he dipped it in some oil he found dripping from the belly of a wounded generator hidden behind the hospital (which was, not so long ago, a Buddhist temple), and lo, by nightfall, it was set for another ten or fifteen pages. It has since become part of his morning ritual.

The reason I mention this so early on is that whatever it is that he puts into this customized ink of his reminds me of a perfume I once purchased for your mother in Madrid, before the war in China came to take me away. A whiff of lavender and mint that is my own Proustian delight. As I work, these keys release small shock waves of that perfume into the air, making this letter--for brief periods at least--an almost pleasant walk down memory lane. I imagine these additives, whatever they are, are meant only to suppress the oil's natural foul composition, and perhaps to deepen the colour of the imprint of these letters. It works surprisingly well, I must say. Every morning I find the Remington stripped of its ribbon, and every morning Ho comes to me with my breakfast of millet or steamed rice and tea, his hands stained the same colour as these pages.




I do not have much idle time here, but what little there is I spend trying to make some sense of the fates that have shaped me into the man I am. I'll admit to finding this quite a task. I often think about your mother and see now that she was not so unlike my own mother, how they shared a common desire to improve the world they lived in. I also think about who you will be when you finally read this.