Beginnings: A Slightly Surreal Serial Novel
Introduction + Synopsis
Only by the Grace of the Wind is perched at the intersection of the surreal and grounded, where the filmmaker Michel Gondry might pair his dreamy explorations of identity and memory with the doctor-writer Adam Kay's behind-the-hospital-curtain account of medical training's soft underbelly.
It is a story about pounds of flesh and what gets lost along the way. There's even a bit of Jewish mysticism sprinkled in. I'm very hopeful you will like it.
This serial novel will be released in twelve weekly chapter instalments on successive Monday mornings beginning May 27, 2024.
Synopsis:
For Karina Bergson, the past crests over the present like a towering wave. Her mother died last year after a whirlwind battle with lung cancer, and in her absence, Karina has assumed care of her increasingly befuddled father, who attends an elderly daycare program under the pretence that he has been hired as the community centre’s librarian. Theirs is a fraught relationship marked by rippling grief and a joint yearning for a halcyon past. When he suffers a fatal fall in the library, the chasm of his loss leaves Karina unmoored and alone, tiptoeing through a minefield of fragile egos on the last, desolate leg of her medical residency program journey. In the gaps between long shifts, she juggles her burgeoning grief with the administration of her parents' modest estate and a waning social life enacted largely through wistful text messages to her stalwart friend, Rhiannon. Â
But everything changes when she discovers an epistolary manuscript in an old typewriter in her father's office. He has left a final letter for her, and to her astonishment, it grants her access to his memory city, which he built over a lifetime using the ancient method of loci. At first, she is like a bewildered tourist in an exotic locale, excavating an unknown past from recollections treasured and concealed alike. Her parents come into vivacious focus as they were in the years before her birth, and she finds bittersweet solace in the braids of emerging memory. But then there are the unexplained occurrences, the strange woman who insists she is an old friend, the memory misfires, the impossibility of it all. Karina's life in the world of solids continues to lurch forward, bringing new relationships and mysteries, but there is something reeling her back, first to her father's memories and then to her own. Â
In the interstices of this new life, she begins a tentative relationship with Ben Trovato, a newly-minted sessional instructor at the university in town, and as their connection deepens, she divulges her secret. His skepticism spurs a final return to the realm of memory, where she finds herself stranded amid the vast terrain of recollection. There, she must confront the horizon of her remembered past, which bumps up against the welter of the unfolding present. Everything begins to blend, the real and the remembered, Karina's souvenirs and her father's, then and now. Karina searches in vain for an exit, a trapdoor leading back to the world of solids, but the tug of memory seems to be getting stronger. And little by little, it is dawning on her that she may never return.
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this post are generated using AI technology
Click below to jump right in:
Thanks, Neil!