Book Review: Sorrow by Catherine Gammon
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Sorrow by Catherine Gammon |
| Braddock Avenue Books, 2013 $16.00 |
For years she had kept herself alive by working out the details. What was left to imagine? She knew everything except which of them it would be. Necessity was what she understood: When? Now. Why? Because. But Who? always eluded her. Choose me, the little voice said.
In Sorrow, by Catherine Gammon, readers are immediately thrown into the mind of Anita Palatino, a seemingly competent woman who works in New York City and lives with her mother. Yet, Anita is secretly haunted by memories of her childhood of sexual abuse; as a result, she creates an outer shell to ensure that she will not suffer again. However, when she reviews the above questions and finally determines whom she will murder, the actually act of killing her mother sends her into a tailspin and she spends the rest of the novel fighting to reconcile.
Told in three separate parts, Gammon explores themes of abuse, guilt, love, repression, faith, and the undeniable desire to be a whole, unified person. Throughout each section, Anita’s walls start to come down, exposing more of her torrid past and a circle of unrepentant abusers. Surrounded by neighbors and a young nun who all believe she’s innocent, Anita struggles to keep her secret from those closest to her and find a way to make peace with her past transgressions. All the while, the reader is left wondering if Anita will ever be exposed for her crime.
Gammon uses third person point of view to examine Cruz Garcia, Tomas, Sister Monica Luz, and Magda Ramirez. These characters allow new insight into Anita and permit Gammon to weave a more complicated narrative filled with pain and uneasiness. In only a sentence or two, Gammon manages to reveal each character’s feelings in a way that resonates with the reader. For example:
When [Sister Monica] proposed to Cruz that Anita should leave with her and make a retreat with the sisters, the look of alarm passed so quickly across his face that Sister Monica must have been unsure whether she had seen it until his eyes began to glisten and he agreed that it was the right place for Anita to go.
Not only are these character shown as complicated individuals and their desires are illuminated to ensure that the reader understands the dynamic relationship between Anita, Sister Monica, and Cruz Garcia. Gammon further illustrates this by detailing small gestures that creates a tension and a desire to find out what else Sister Monica and Cruz Garcia are hiding.
On the other side of the friend spectrum, Tomas — a young man who escapes illegally to the United States — is caught between his own need to work at the grocery store for money, his love for Anita, and a desire to return to El Salvador where his family resides. Then there’s Magda Ramirez who uses Anita’s crime as a way to examine her own tangled past with her husband and a desire to earn more than just a steady paycheck. Together these characters get the chance to really live for the first time in years as they make an irreversible decision to either continue to stand with Anita or allow their own needs for love and desire to come first.
Unfortunately in Anita’s story, she’s forced to encounter one of her past abusers with or without her friends. During these intimate and awkward moments, she becomes even more fragmented. Using long sentences, Gammon exposes Anita’s true thoughts:
Anita in the darkness by herself hears the breathing in the darkness hears the breathing by herself Anita hears her name in the breathing in the darkness her name Anita in the name her life her heart her dying hears the flow of blood and the pulse and in her heart the heart of living[…]
Here, the lack of punctuation continues for four pages, until the end of the chapter. While there are other spots that Gammon uses long, twisting sentences, filled with commas to expose Anita’s rambling mindset, this chapter highlights the darkness within her and the deeply rooted explanation for her crime.
Only when Anita finally defeats her past, lays herself completely bare, and turns to her friends for help does she think, “So much of my life was made up of these moments of mixed knowledge, of delayed recognition, of discovering again what she already knew.” This idea explains Anita’s character transformation and throws the reader directly into the thrilling climax where Anita’s true character is tested.
Once Gammon illustrates the importance of exposure, the reader can see the true effects of abuse and the need for escape that Anita so desires. Sorrow makes one last impression when the book ends with the chilling idea of “love” as a motivator for Anita’s crimes. One that shows that if she had not been so blind to the affection of her friends and neighbors, then she never would have been forced to relive her past, kill her mother, or experience the rippling effects of her crime.