It's about Arlo, a DeafBlind man, and his tactile interpreter, Cyril. Cyril's chapters are in first person, and talk a Holy wow. This was remarkable.
It's about Arlo, a DeafBlind man, and his tactile interpreter, Cyril. Cyril's chapters are in first person, and talk a lot about both the ethics and the science/art of interpreting, and it's absolutely fascinating. The writing is beautiful, especially in the descriptions of tactile and haptic interpreting, where one interpreter uses all kinds of touch on the DeafBlind person's body to describe what's going on while another translates speech. It's conveyed with wonderful imagery and feeling and real poetry. The author is a DeafBlind interpreter and his obvious depth of understanding is conveyed with marvellous clarity. I can't overstate how well done this is, not just in showing how it works, but in the way it makes us understand how it opens up the world to Arlo.
Arlo's chapters, meanwhile, are told in the second person. I spent a lot of time trying to work out why--I find second person distancing rather than immersive--and I concluded that might be the point. A DeafBlind person's voice is conveyed by an interpreter becoming their voice, and perhaps the second person puts us in that relationship to Arlo--not inside his head as first person would do, but also not outside as in third person. Interpreting his experience. I dunno. Striking in its combination of his very limited experience (deprived by the people around him as much as by his disability) and the insight and wrestling with ideas.
The dialogue is fascinating, especially the way DeafBlind communication is conveyed and translated or transliterated to English, onto which it absolutely does not naturally map because they're completely different languages.
There's some very hard stuff in here. Arlo has suffered a fair bit of abuse in various ways, and the book does a great job of conveying how stifling and terrifying and frustrating his life has been/can be very easily made. It's not trauma porn, though, still less Abled Saviour: Arlo is fiercely determined and his courage drives the plot, dragging along several of the abled characters who were otherwise mostly sitting around feeling sorry for themselves.
It is a bit overlong, especially in the first half--I think mostly because it's establishing Arlo's love affair with a girl at his residential school, for romance heft. This is a bit of a hiding to nothing because let's be honest, nobody actually buys 17yos falling in eternal love with one another, and really this isn't a romance novel. It's a story of Arlo finding his feet once he gets the assistance he needs, and Cyril finding his spine, and a couple of other characters finding their moral cores. The romance is there, but as part of the overall story. Do stick with it, although it does drag a tad around 30%: the story accelerates at about 50% and you will whip through to the hugely satisfying end. Also Arlo's speech to the carer who denied him access to the world is one of the most delightful, enraged fuck-you speeches I've ever read and you don't want to miss it. /loud cheers/
This book is really one of the best examples I've read of how fiction can give you a look inside a different life. Very highly recommended....more
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