Looking at an old portrait of my mother’s family and their neighbours, taken by a photographer who travelled with his camera and tripod from Regina to the various farming communities in Saskatchewan, I often think there but for fortune go I. Peasants who worked the land, posing in front of a white-plastered sod house. Her parents had emigrated from Romania before World War I, a courageous act to say the least, leaving a life where they had little and the landowners had much. I am not, nor was I ever, ashamed of my peasant roots.

Sometimes, I think my mother resented her origins. Choices for a woman in her class and situation were limited with less than a grade-school education, no books in the house, no parental encouragement or support. Like the heroine in Mihali’s novel, A Ramshackle Home (LLP 2023), however, she was filled with fantasies of what she might have done if she had been born elsewhere and into a different family, if she had refused the offer of an arranged marriage, never a happy one. She told me stories repeatedly of what she could have been, what might have happened, if only, if only, and then she would sit silently by the kitchen table, her hands still covered with bread flour, moving one to the other as if turning the pages of an invisible book.

Ramshackle is a word that describes a building in disrepair, caving in on itself, derelict. It’s a word that aptly describes the emotional and psychological state of its nameless heroine, a woman who leaves Bucharest and returns to her family home with her young son after the failure of her marriage.
It's also a word that can be applied to many aspects of Romania after decades of communist rule, and the political realities and/or horrors of the period. These provide a social context for the narrator’s feelings and observations, since A Ramshackle Home is also novel about memory, cultural roots, female desire and female rage against the overbearing male, the lusts of the physical body, and the shame a modern, educated woman feels about her peasant ancestry:

We all had a big complex about our roots. The past was a heavy burden for all of us. It was there, in our souls, but it brought no joy. Everything that awakened a memory of the past, everything that was closely related to it, felt like an unpleasant weight on our shoulders.

Mihali’s first novel, written before the much-praised The Darling of Kandahar (LLP 2012), A Ramshackle Home can feel emotionally overcharged, but it’s so rich with cultural detail and the narrator’s struggles to make order out of chaos, externally and internally, and to find purpose and value in her life, that readers may forgive the sometimes feverish prose as the narrator lays bare her deepest feelings and thoughts.

Reading this novel sparked memories of my own. During my grandmother’s funeral in the Romanian Orthodox church of my childhood, for example, I remember seeing my mother with a host of aunts and cousins standing in a circle, each holding a round braided loaf with a candle burning in the centre. Mihali’s narrator recalls the bread consumed in honour of the deceased:

I loved the meal they used to serve after burying the dead. As children, we would gather around a table laden with colaci, sweet buns which, according to Orthodox custom, would ensure that the deceased were fed in the afterlife. My grandmother would light candles inserted into each of the golden loaves while my mother put chunks of white squash out on a glass platter. We waited for my grandfather to be buried before eating the colaci made for him. If one of the candles went out, it was a sign that the old man had tasted the food.

A Ramshackle Home is well-anchored in the tangible reality of food, drink, flesh, smells, the body and decay. Although she alludes to Defoe’s classic work, Mihali‘s protagonist is much more specific and descriptive, and certainly more emotionally overcharged than Robinson Crusoe, whose voice is limited by attention to the facts of physical survival rather than feelings.
Mihali succeeds where Defoe fails: she details the urges of the body and the maelstrom of her mental life. In sore need of dental work in her self-imposed retreat from civilisation, for example, our heroine describes her mouth as a “sewer through which flowed a miasma of acids and digestive juices that were breaking down.”

Chapters are identified by months of the year, as if to indicate her connection with the demands of rural life, and to indicate how deeply she sinks into both despair and a fantasy life to survive the year. The calendar division also situates the heroine in real, moving time, rendered concrete and memorable by attention to changes in land and weather.
This story, however, is no progression from depletion to fulfilment; it’s not so much a story of overcoming physical hardships and emerging victorious, as it is of endurance and recognition of the real limitations in her life. If she risks melodrama, Mihali equally avoids sentimentality and the standard trope of the happy ending.

[Photos courtesy of the author]

Kenneth Radu has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry. A two-time recipient of the Quebec Writers' Federation award for English-language fiction, his latest book, Net Worth, is published by DC Books Canada. He is currently revising the manuscript of a collection of linked stories. [Photo of the author by Joshua Radu]