SIX METRES OF PAVEMENT by Farzana Doctor (Dundurn), 376 pages, $22.99 paper.
Doctor launches her book at the Gladstone Monday (March 7), when I’ll be interviewing her onstage. See listing. Rating: NNNN
If you’re looking for believable characters, look no further than Farzana Doctor’s fiction. She has a gift for reality-based situations and conveys anxiety and passion in a story that turns into a real page-turner.
Ismail is a Toronto bureaucrat burdened by his past. Twenty years ago, his daughter died when he forgot her in the back seat of his car. Ever since, his life has been defined by the tragedy. He drinks heavily, lives alone and is nowhere close to getting on with his life.
At a writing class he’s chanced upon, he meets Fatima, an undergrad whose parents have thrown her out of the house because she’s identifying too publicly as queer.
The friendship has the potential to take Ismail outside of himself, but it’s his attraction to Celia, the widow who’s moved in with her daughter across the street, that could change everything.
Doctor, whose craft has taken a big leap since her debut, Stealing Nasreen, has a deep understanding of grief – doubtless helped by her day job as a therapist. She also has a gift for detail.
Ismail, for example, perspires profusely when he’s nervous – you can practically smell the sweat stains. And a sequence in which Celia pulls out her pre-widowhood wardrobe vividly evokes her former vibrancy.
Doctor sets the story in Toronto’s Portuguese neighbourhood near Dundas and Brock, a location she evokes with a loving specificity that adds to the book’s pleasure.
This is a story of people trying to recover from what seem like irreparable losses. But it’s also about cross-cultural connection (Ismail is South Asian, Celia Portuguese), the struggle of queer kids in immigrant families and the meaning of chosen family.
A winner.
Write Books at susanc@nowtoronto.com.
