Tamangur: Leta Semadeni’s debut

Courtesy of the University of Chicago Press

Tamangur, Romansh poet Leta Semadeni’s poignant-but-undercooked fiction debut, is a short novel in eighty-four mini vignettes. The protagonist is an unnamed child who lives alone with her loving-but-ill-tempered grandmother in a small village—“full of shadows nestled deep in the mountains,” where “the river, full and glistening, snarls its way to the border”—the name of which you also never learn. One does discover along the way that the child’s grandfather has recently died and left for Tamangur—a mystical spirit realm for hunters from the Romansh ethnic population of the Swiss Alps; that her grandmother and sole guardian has Alzheimer’s, shedding some light on her emotional volatility; that her baby brother drowned in a tragic accident, for which she blames herself; and that after his death her parents “moved away” someplace that’s never named either. While set in the Alps, Tamangur mentions the mountains just a handful of times and hardly describes them at all—an odd stylistic choice that adds to the stripped-down feel of it, which is one of the novel’s sometimes-interesting and sometimes-problematic hallmarks. The novel grapples with themes of abandonment, grief, the life-affirming “warmth” of meanness and hatred, the banality of perfection and peace and the human need for transgression.

The first quarter of Tamangur may take some patience: despite the brevity of the work the first forty pages are almost achingly slow. The grandmother’s anger comes up immediately but is only described in passing; we see her only glancingly in the throes of her regular rages and we never hear a word, in her own voice, of what she’s mad about. Instead we get a slow, meandering tour of the neighborhood. We peek into the village tavern filled with “oddballs” who go “off-the-beaten-path” (the translator may be to blame for the cliches that crop up occasionally) like the gay chimney sweep who drinks wine at the crack of dawn to wash out the soot from his throat, Elsa, the self-styled tough-girl and maneater who helps the grandmother with chores, and Elvis, her boyishly-charming ne’er-do-well boyfriend (a barmaid mentioned in passing has “lost [her] soul” for reasons that are never discussed). Elsa and the grandmother trade mildly humorous anecdotes about quirky villagers, some who return and others who appear and vanish just as soon. Some fairly disgusting local eating habits are revealed: the child’s grandfather put cheese in his coffee, which melted and rose to the lid of his mug like French onion soup; at Christmas dinner grandma drinks cream to “slide down” the flesh of the unnamed bird she devours and gnaws to the bone to “make room for dessert.” The story brushes up against other peculiar details of village life, like the “Bench of Lies” where old people meet to sit and lie to each other, but what lies do they tell and why? The reader is left to guess a lot; sometimes what little one knows is enough (the child and her family don’t really need names, nor does their village) and sometimes not.

While the opening vignettes display some strong imagery (her grandmother’s heart is “a vast forest with thick underbrush, towering trees” and “clearings…that open like a surprise; the river “snarls its way to the border,” a menacing image foreshadowing her family’s great tragedy) I was almost forty pages in before anything resonated deeply. When, in a flashback, the snarling river devours her baby brother after she loses her grip on his tiny hand, then spits him out over the border into the Black Sea where the child imagines his soul living on and “chasing after boats,” a bolt of pathos shocks the reader awake. That disclosure feels perfectly timed; it makes it worth waiting for the story to really get moving but I might have given up first if I hadn’t been reading to write a review.

While certain characters—the protagonist, her grandparents, Elsa and others—come alive, attentively portrayed with nuance and complexity, others are underdeveloped. The absent parents in particular, who are hardly described or even mentioned for reasons that aren’t clear, are impenetrably vague. They appear to be removed not only from the child’s life but from her thoughts as well. Because they’re not around? Her grandfather and brother aren’t either but she remembers them often. Does she prefer not to think of her parents out of anger or shame? The reader can only speculate. The mother does make it clear to the child that she favored the brother, which the daughter ascribes to her own “ugliness” (the boy was blond and angelic while the narrator had red hair and freckles). The child’s thoughts reveal too that she suspects, and not without reason, that her mother blames her for the accident, but that’s pretty much all one ever learns about the parents except that they’ve abandoned her. Ninety-six pages in, two thirds of the way through Tamangur, when a chance encounter with another elderly villager reveals that both he and the grandmother have Alzheimer’s, their negligence becomes all the more shocking if not criminal: as her grandmother grows older, more adrift in her memories and detached from her life in the present, the child’s future, and her present safety and well-being feel more uncertain and precarious. The subtext is heartbreaking but what is it about these parents that could make them so cruel and uncaring? There is little occasion to observe them with her or at all. Were they anywhere in sight when her brother drowned? Why would they allow two young children to play in a river alone or out of arm’s reach? None of it’s in the story; too much is omitted.

The timing of the revelation of the grandmother’s illness felt spot on, too, which demonstrates that Semadeni a poet, is possessed of a novelist’s instinct. And despite the slow pace and quiet plot the characters and themes are generally unusual and compelling enough to hold the reader’s attention. Some of the vignettes felt finished while others read like sketches: in the latter one sees the outlines of the author’s vision but never the full picture. One example appears in the final pages. The seventy-ninth vignette, one short paragraph and one short sentence long, is written as follows:

Once, when the child’s parents were still there, a small circus came to the village. In the twilight, the ballerina led a large billy goat in a circle on a mowed field and bats got caught in her hair. The child stood entranced between her mother and her father, who held her hand. Her mother stood at a distance, her hand on her large belly, which held the little brother.

This image remained, unshakably, with the child.

Here we have the germ of an image that is horribly vivid and unsettling, so much so that it sears itself into the child’s mind. Bats got stuck in a woman’s hair?! It’s horrifying to imagine but one shouldn’t have to imagine everything on one’s own when reading a novel. Does the performer shriek in terror? Swat at her head? Does the crowd react? Do they yell? Laugh? Freeze up like the child? How big is the crowd and how far away does the audience stand? How did her parents react? What were the expressions on their faces (the father incidentally is mentioned here explicitly for only the second time in one-hundred-and-forty-two pages and just barely)? The reader sees none of it. This moment and others like it are missed opportunities but the work as a whole is accomplished and shows real promise.

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