The Perpetual Ending

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster.

Jane has left her boyfriend, Simon, and is travelling back to her
childhood home for the first time in years to visit her mother, Lucy,
who is dying. What complicates this storyline are the memories that
emerge for Jane, nested into each other: “I am learning,” she points
out, “that every memory has a memory inside it, in the delightful and
dismaying way of Russian dolls.”

What bubbles to the surface as Jane travels back to the past is her
childhood beginning as a twin with Eugenie, her polar opposite. Their
life together is often a drama of family entanglements. Their mother,
whom they call Lucy, is a flighty soul; their father, who for the most
part remains unnamed, is an angry one. When tragedy strikes, Jane’s
connection to the family is severed and she reinvents herself as a
single child, an orphan. This is a highly introspective book: Jane is
inwardly conflicted and trapped in her memories. Even the stories she
has written (stories illustrated by Simon) are achingly sad and sweet,
acting as windows into her relationship to her past.

Kristen den Hartog maintains an intensity of emotion throughout this
compelling and structurally interesting novel. Jane’s memories are
told in the present tense, while the main narrative is presented in the
more conventional past. Den Hartog captures real moments of memory: in
the tangible smell of turkey cooking, in the crowds on transit, in
remembered textures, we find ourselves as trapped as Jane in the eddies
of the mind.