nettles

As an alternative to the photos I've been publishing here of late, I thought I'd post a review I wrote recently for the books section of the Winnipeg Free Press. The review is more bubble than squeak but at least it contains a minimum of babble...

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The Nettle Spinner
By Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Goose Lane Editions, 202 pages, $21.95

By Ariel Gordon

Writing sex scenes well is hard to do. Unless an author is vigilant, there is the risk that what is supposed to be sensual will be either overwrought or overly clinical. Both extremes produce snickers and heavy underlining in its readers.

But, as Toronto author Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer notes in her first novel The Nettle Spinner, there is no escaping writing about sex because “narrative is sexual. Everything is sexual.”

Fortunately for the reader, Kuitenbrouwer writes narrative – and sex – well.

That said, this is no easy-peasy romp; though it depicts a variety of consensual/sensual encounters there is also a rape in The Nettle Spinner that harkens back to Aritha Van Herk’s The Tent Peg (1981) with its depictions of female sexuality and power in what have traditionally been male preserves.

Unlike The Tent Peg or even Marian Engel’s similarly controversial Bear (1976), however, Kuitenbrouwer’s novel is unique in that the sexuality it depicts is neither transgressive (i.e. as a result of being unmasked as a woman in an all-male mining camp) nor fantastical (i.e. between a librarian and a bear).

Part of the sea-change in women’s writing about sex (and sexual violence) comes in the fact that writing about female desire is no longer controversial, as it was for Engel, Van Herk, and even Margaret Laurence when she published her Manawaka novels. Kuitenbrouwer is also writing in an age when the expression “women’s work” means more than housekeeping and childrearing, including everything from office work to the trades.

The Nettle Spinner, for instance, is set in a treeplanting camp in northern Ontario, where what you earn is based solely on how many conifers you can put in the ground. The main character, Alma, has already spent several summers planting when we meet her, enjoying both the high pay and the hard work of treeplanting. Unfortunately, she also has the misfortune of having caught the attention of Karl, a veteran treeplanter “who reeked of garlic and had the rheumy eyes of a drinker.”

Alma evades Karl long enough to enjoy a passionate affair with Willem, a Belgian logger, but soon after Willem leaves camp, Karl attacks her. The rape forces Alma to flee both her apartment in civilized southern Canada and the tent city of her fellow treeplanters for a shack further in the bush, where she has plenty of time to brood on both her advancing pregnancy and the similarities between her experiences and a beloved Flemish folk tale.

Though the story of Alma, Karl, and Willem does not completely parallel that of Renelde, Guilbert, and Burchard in the folk tale, Kuitenbrouwer teases out enough resonances between the two to make things interesting for readers. Both Alma and Renelde are weavers, for instance, and each woman’s story revolves around the spinning of a shroud out of stinging nettle.

That said, sometimes the resonances between the two feel contrived, especially compared to the passages where Kuitenbrouwer drops the “mythic pose” to describe the politics and practice of treeplanting, for instance, or Alma’s ambivalent relationships with her mother and her newborn son. These sections of The Nettle Spinner are visceral and nasty and positively hum.

In the end, despite these quibbles, The Nettle Spinner is immensely satisfying, both as an elaboration of the themes Kuitenbrouwer took up in Way Up, her earlier collection of short stories, and as a contribution to the tradition of sexy Canadian fiction written by women.