Title: The
Last Thread
Author: Michael
Sala
Publisher:
Affirm Press
Publish
date: 2012
ISBN: 978 0
9871326 8 0
‘One of
Michaelis’s fingers gets wedged between concrete and metal and splits open. He
screams. The go-kart stops and he sits there, staring at the wound. (…) A
curled leaf of skin hangs from his finger. The tears do not come straight away.
The blood holds back. Both come out at once, and then he can’t stop. He is
bleeding and wailing like he was made for it. (…)
The
tomatoes are swollen and dark and red. Mum runs a knife along each one, before
she drops it into boiling water. A thin cut in the flesh, barely visible. The
skin of the tomato unfurls when it hits the water, like a flower blooming.’
This is the
autobiographical story of a migration and re-migration from the Netherlands to
Australia, back again to the Netherlands, and back again to Australia, from the
viewpoint of a child of Dutch-Greek heritage, set from the 1970s onward. The
first two thirds of the story is told in the third person, and concerns the
story of the protagonist as a child. The last third is in the first person and
shifts (generally) to events further towards adulthood.
By far the
greatest strength of the book is in the spare and evocative language, which is
mainly deployed in the third person section. The example above, where disparate
scenes or thoughts are linked by visceral images into an impressionist collage
of fears and pains, is typical. Most of the initial section is satisfyingly
close to poetry. The spaces between the words are given exactly the right
amount of room for the reader to create their own experiences, and assimilate
the force of often confused emotion behind the language.
This
strength ebbs rather dramatically in the latter section. Whether the intention
is to impose a more ‘adult’ structure on the thoughts, to seem more detached,
more in charge or further along the path of understanding, or some other
reason, for me this was a disappointing development. Not only is the language
less dense, but the structure is strangely confusing. The narrative about the
half-brother Tomos has been shoehorned in awkwardly, with no attempt to fit it
into the rest of the story. Possibly this imitates the awkwardness and
immobility of the character being described, but for the reader I didn’t find
it translated into greater appreciation – it was just like having a filing
cabinet out of order. Likewise, the story about the quasi-stepfather Brian is
spattered messily across the latter pages, leaving the reader in a sense of
confusion about when exactly the events are happening. Again, perhaps this is
intentional, as it creates a nightmarish loop of different iterations of the
same events taking place over and over again, which is redolent of the
character of Brian. But from the consumer’s perspective, it gives but a
half-hearted satisfaction.
Overall,
the enjoyment of language was notable in parts, and I would be happy to read
more from this author. Between three and four moose-hoofs up out of five –
would be a clear four, but the subject matter is a little dreary and lacks the
zest to pull it into the clear.
